New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Academic Paper

Title:

On the Effect of disciplinary variation on transitivity: The case of academic book reviews

The purpose of this study was twofold. First, an attempt was made to/L/systematically characterize Book Reviews (BRs) as an academic written genre in terms of the elements of transitivity system. Secondly, the effect of disciplinary/L/variation on the lexico-grammatical features of this genre was explored. To this end, a/L/corpus of 90 academic BRs from discipline-related professional journals (physics,/L/sociology, and literature) were randomly selected and analyzed. Significant differences were observed in terms of both the type and frequency of processes and/L/participants. This, it seems, points to a difference in the semantic configuration of BRs/L/peculiar to each discipline, although they all seem to fulfill a similar communicative purpose— evaluating knowledge production in the academic milieu. To be more specific, the observed features indicate that BRs in physics journals, as compared to their/L/counterparts in sociology and literature journals, appear to carry a higher/L/percentage of passive construction, non-human concrete participants, and of/L/relational and existential processes, together with a lower percentage/L/of specific human participants; hence, leading to texts heavily laden with grammatical/L/metaphor and impersonality.